By Johnny Ray Huston

'IN MY OWN sick way, I've always been true to you." That sentiment, arriving in the final moments of Morrissey's 1994 album, Vauxhall and I (Sire), could be addressed to a lover or a fan. Either way, it hinges on familiar topics: his solitude and the idea of a union. Today he might be the quintessential solitary man (the name of his hornet's nest of a fan site is Morrissey Solo), but Morrissey arrived as one half of what many argue was the last great rock duo. Though partner-in-song Johnny Marr preferred Leiber and Stoller over Richards and Jagger as a reference point, he and Morrissey were undoubtedly a pair made in songwriting heaven – no matter how British high court judges slice it.

When Johnny Rogan performed his first quasi-biographical autopsy on the Smiths, he titled it Morrissey and Marr: The Severed Alliance; Smiths bassist Andy Rourke and Smiths drummer Mike Joyce were pointedly left out of the picture. One could argue that Morrissey's direct entreaties to fans – such as the aforementioned line from Vauxhall executioner's song "Speedway" – truly commenced when his partnership with Marr began to fray. One pivotal point of their last recording together, 1986's Strangeways, Here We Come (Sire), is a song that allows just such an admirer to enter a vulgar day-in-the-death-of-a-band picture. From that point onward, Morrissey has increasingly sung to a "you," and that "you" has become more of an open, tricky proposition. Romantically, it can represent a confidante, as on Vauxhall, or a scorned ex, as on Southpaw Grammar (Reprise). On his first solo album, 1988's Viva Hate (Sire), the person addressed on "I Don't Mind If You Forget Me" could be Marr, a listener, or both.

A man wearing the robes of the law famously labeled Morrissey "devious, truculent, and unreliable," and a number of managers and record company employees probably second that emotion. Yet Morrissey has also proved his devotion over time, perhaps to his creative detriment. In the first years after the demise of the Smiths, it was he, not Marr, who briefly brought Rourke and Joyce back into the fold. During and after that short-lived reunion, he pledged compositional allegiance to the pair of sub-Marr guitarists, Boz Boorer and Alain Whyte, who remain with him today. Where Marr's playing skipped and figure-skated over his own arrangements, Boorer and Whyte tend toward the turgid and generic. "At [Morrissey's] level of lyric artistry, [his band's] warmed-over arena rock backdrops are a waste," fellow agony aunt Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields recently opined, and in this case, at least, his complaints are worthy of his last name.

The occasion for Merritt's lament was the release of You Are the Quarry (Attack), Morrissey's first album of the 21st century. In truth, it's Quarry's production, rather than musicianship, that's initially off-putting. Jerry Finn has outfitted the songs with the same repetitive, thwacking backbeat found on his other platinum MTV rock enterprises, a disservice to someone even ever scornful Merritt (probably placing himself in another genre) readily acknowledges is "the best lyricist in rock." But remaining true to Morrissey requires looking past the pedestrian limits of his musical surroundings and connecting with the sublime reaches of his voice. His writing has often grown more pointed in becoming less florid. His singing only advances in command.

Quarry holds many peerless pleasures, from the offhandedly profound blasphemies of "I Have Forgiven Jesus" to the wholly glorious "The First of the Gang to Die," which contains some of the Wilde-est quips to travel from pen to paper to speaker in all of Morrissey's career. Beginning in Morrissey's version of Oscar's gutter, the song outdoes that starry-eyed paradox in three lines: "You have never been in love / Until you've seen the dawn rise / Behind the Home for the Blind." At the end, when Morrissey sings of a petty thief who "stole all hearts away," his voice rises to a sob-choked falsetto even as his phrasing of "away" threatens to turn into a merrily mocking laugh. It's a trick he's done before, but no one else can do it, and he's never done it better.

Apparently, plenty of other people feel there's life beyond Marr, because Morrissey is in the throes of a resurgence right now, with some of Finn's mall punks (and groups such as Franz Ferdinand) calling him daddy. You can attribute some of this attention to the seven-year itch that's formed since his last go-round, 1997's Maladjusted. Also, ironic or not, I Love the '80s-style sentiments are far more prevalent today than they were during the Clinton years, even if Morrissey's musical-mental instability is conspicuously absent from – too naked for? – a touchstone such as Donnie Darko. The opinion-free state of pop and mainstream rock certainly partly accounts for Morrissey's current appeal: so many dolls leeched of personality throw his character in stark relief. But ultimately, he's being repaid for his unflagging dedication to all the "you" 's out there (I count myself among them) while changing into the really-so-strange yet familiar person he is today. He's become a star in the tradition of Hollywood's golden age, right down to his mansion (which previously belonged to Clark Gable and Carole Lombard). In comparison, Ian, Siouxsie, and Robert and company seem exactly the same, just older.

Ever since his voice first came moaning over the moors, Morrissey has sounded old before his time, so it's no surprise he wears his now quite apparent age better than most of his peers. Quarry's sentiments regarding America verge on trite, but they're better than the silence that characterizes other current major-label acts. (He's better at critiquing the United States from the vantage point of Mexico, on one of at least two Quarry B-sides that outshine the majority of the album.) Since Vauxhall remains Morrissey's best solo work, it's best to end where we began, at "Speedway" 's dramatic, climactic drumroll. Changing just one word from the phrase before it, that album's last line might be addressed to Marr, and it certainly applies to all those afar (in other words, anyone who can hear). "In my own strange way, I've always stayed true to you."

Morrissey plays with Tears for Fears, Dashboard Confessional, and Howie Day at Alice's Now and Zen Fest Sept. 19, noon, Golden Gate Park, Sharon Meadow, Kezar and JFK, S.F. $35. www.ticketweb.com.